Astronauts Power Up Suits, Spacewalk Begins

NASA astronauts (from left) Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins will conduct their third spacewalk together on Saturday morning.
NASA astronauts (from left) Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins will conduct their third spacewalk together on Saturday morning.

NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins have begun their spacewalk outside the International Space Station to service the station’s cooling system and communications gear.

The pair switched their spacesuits to battery power at 8:14 a.m. EST to begin the spacewalk, which is expected to last about six and a half hours.

Watch the spacewalk on NASA TV, the NASA app, and on the agency’s website.

Glover is extravehicular crew member 1 (EV 1), wearing a spacesuit bearing red stripes and using helmet camera #20. Hopkins is extravehicular crew member 2 (EV 2), wearing the unmarked spacesuit and helmet camera #22.

Glover and Hopkins will traverse out the station’s backbone truss structure to vent the early ammonia system before relocating one of its jumper lines. Hopkins will then connect cables for the Columbus Bartolomeo payload platform, continuing work from a Jan. 27 spacewalk, and Glover will replace a wireless antenna assembly on the Unity module. The pair will then work together to install hardware on the airlock’s thermal cover and route cables to two high-definition cameras on the port truss.

This is the 237th spacewalk in support of space station assembly.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.



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